Archaeological and biometric perspectives on the development of chicken landraces in the Horn of Africa

Abstract

Domestic chickens (Gallus gallus domesticus L., 1758) were integrated into agricultural systems in the Horn of Africa as early as the pre‐Aksumite period (c. 2,500 years ago), after they were introduced from Asia through land and maritime trade and exchange. In this paper, we explore the development of chicken landraces in this region by examining continuity and change in chicken body size. Specifically, we compare the measurements of chicken bones dating from 800 BCE to 400 BCE from the pre‐Aksumite site of Mezber in northern Ethiopia, with those of modern chickens (of known age and sex) from northern Ethiopia and a population of known age and sex cross‐bred red junglefowl (Gallus gallus L., 1758), curated at the Natural History Museum at Tring (UK). Considered together, these datasets provide insight into African poultry development and offer the first metrical baselines of chickens with known history in the region. Thus, this study has the potential to underpin future studies of domestic fowl morphology in Africa.

When Did the Chicken Cross the Road: Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia

“…For example, there have been many claims of pre-Ptolemaic chickens in Egypt, but the earliest indisputable evidence comes from the last centuries BC 15 . Fascinatingly, the chicken appears to have spread via coastal routes to Central Africa prior to its dispersal in Egypt 16 . There are also a handful of early reports of chicken bones in Europe, pre-dating the Roman expansions.…”

Archaeological and molecular evidence for ancient chickens in Central Asia

“…A recent synthesis of the zooarchaeological literature for Russia has illustrated that the chicken spread into western Russia and the river valleys of the steppe by 1,000 years ago and aDNA data suggested that it spread into the region from Europe rather than West Asia 97 . Despite the lack of data, we suggest that chicken likely simultaneously dispersed along a: 1) southern sea route; and 2) southern Himalayan and trans-Iranian/southern Central Asian route on its westward journey 17 , 43 . Interestingly, these two routes of dispersal have just been presented as the same two routes that rice ( Oryza sativa ) spread along at roughly the same period, ca.…”

“…Some archaeologists working in Egypt have argued that the chicken was introduced early, lost, and then reintroduced during the Ptolemaic period 16 , others dismiss the fragmentary earlier evidence, claiming that the chicken was first introduced to Egypt with the Greeks 70 . There is, however, good evidence for chickens in Central Africa earlier; at the pre-Aksumite site of Mezber, dating between 800 and 400 BC, in Ethiopia in the Horn of Africa 17 .…”

“…For example, there have been many claims of pre-Ptolemaic chickens in Egypt, but all evidence older than the last centuries BC has been either questioned or rejected by scholars 16 . Fascinatingly, the chicken appears to have spread via coastal routes to Central Africa prior to its dispersal in Egypt 17 . There are also a handful of early reports of chicken bones in Europe, pre-dating the Roman expansions, but only rising to prominence in the Greco-Roman period, when specialized poultry farms developed for the first time 18 , 19 .…”

Pioneering Poultry: A Morphometric Investigation of Seventeenth- to Early Twentieth-Century Domestic Chickens (Gallus gallus) in Eastern North America

“…Geographical proximity was used as a basis for data aggregation because it permits some level of control over the potential variance in colonist or chicken origins. A low frequency of chicken remains in animal bone assemblages is not unusual and one solution to this problem is to combine data from correlated elements, a method used previously for chickens (Thomas et al 2013;Fothergill 2017;Woldekiros et al 2019) and cats (O'Connor 2017). It has been demonstrated that measurements taken in the same anatomical plane are highly correlated (Meadow 1999;Davis 1996), allowing metrics from the same axis to be amalgamated and maximise the potential of limited datasets.…”